Proposal talk:Historic site
National Register of Historic Places
I've been plowing through the National Register for the USA, which is administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior. The website for this can be found here:
(NPS is "National Park Service")
Getting onto this register is not a trivial process, and requires a nomination and screening process by the "local" state historical society or historic preservation association, and also has to be reviewed by historians on both the state and national levels. This said, in the USA there are about 80,000 locations in this database that have met this distinction, and most of them can be said to be historical sites of one form or another.
As to if it applies to this proposal, I do think historical locations of some sort or another can and ought to be mapped.
BTW, this register classifies locations into several different categories:
- Buildings
- Sites
- Districts (containing several buildings or even a whole neighborhood)
- Structures (not necessarily a building)
- Objects
These locations are not always (in fact, usually not) publicly owned, but they must meet the historical criteria of some significance. I hope looking at this can help, and it would be nice to see if there are other kinds of historical registers of this nature that apply to other countries. --Robert Horning 18:53, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
- There are plenty of comparable registers, see Wikipedia for a partial list. Circeus 23:30, 27 June 2009 (UTC)
- Thanks for this list and link. In order to advance this proposal, the question lies in what kind of historic sites and locations might be designated as such, and how can these be listed? Certainly this is a source of information that can be mapped in some way, and indeed ought to be. Should this instead be:
- historic=building
- historic=district
- historic=object
- historic=site
- and more that are using the terms of the registries, or should these be grouped together as is this proposal to simply be historic=heritage as a general catch-all for these kinds of place? On that point I'm not sure. It would be useful in discussing this proposal to get a better feel for these registries and what information is in them that could be mapped to standardize how they can be depicted in OpenStreetMap. --Robert Horning 09:22, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
- I was thinking that the specific "classification" of what is listed is much less relevant (if at all!) than where it is listed and the specific form of listing (there are some 12 different designations in the U.S. alone, Quebec has 6 and so on.). The NRHP itself has only 2 designations: "place" (that is, anything that is not a district) and "district", which can additionally become designated as "National Landmark". However, whether they are a building, structure (i.e. radio mast, fire observation tower) or object (e.g. a roadside object, a fountain or public sculpture, a memorial) is rather irrelevant since it should normally be indicated by different tags. Circeus 22:26, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
I'd like to ask that this be resurrected. There are many places where a historic=site or similar is needed; typically a group of ancient structures (not ruins, and not archaeology) that are now a place of significant interest. For instance, the group of historic temples at Pattadakal. Indigomc 13:17, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
The designation tag clashes with Key:designation which whilst unofficial is far more widely used, I've noted this in the proposal. A more suitable tag should be considered. Pishmishy 10:03, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
- My feeling is that a better use would be in the context of a relation, specifically, type=site + site=historic _or_ type=site + site=* (use-type) + historic=* ('site' if entire site or some other description which designates what about the site is historic, e.g. 'location' if not the current contents or 'buildings' if it is the buildings which are historic but not the grounds between them, etc.). Relation:site indicates that 'site' is widely used but has not gone through formal approval. In the proposal at Relations/Proposed/Site, site=* as a relation key is defined as "The type of site (eg school or railway_station)" which does create potential conflict as one might want to both define the use-type and the site-type (eg use-type=school, site-type=historic). This could be handled by allowing 1..* values for the attribute, or using the existing historic=* as an optional relation attribute. As for the matter of designation=*, I would recommend using a combination of attribution=* and ref=* (see example at http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/71219692 ). --Ceyockey 23:10, 26 November 2011 (UTC)